Reviews

Blacksite: Area 51

If you do actually manage to make out the dialogue you'll find that the political commentary feels heavy-handed where it should be subtle. The level titles are an obvious jab at US foreign policy in Iraq, such as "MisUnderestimated," and "Regime Change," and there's lots of discussion about America's mistreatment of its citizens... if your TV is up loud enough, at least. The problem is that no matter where you align yourself politically, the ideology feels stilted. Rather than showing, it tells. And when it does tell, it doesn't seem to want to dig any deeper than "yeah, the reason the insurgents have those guns is because we sold them to 'em, dumbass."

Blacksite boasts shiny Unreal Engine 3 graphics, which unfortunately contribute even more to its blandness. The desert terrain looks great but it's not really showing you anything extraordinary. The Reborn soldiers look competent enough, but as a whole aren't very menacing to fight. Your fellow soldiers look good in outdoor environments, but in dark areas the shadows can show off some ugly jaggies. At some points in the game the framerate drops to what must be the teens. The game has some nice visuals, but as a whole they're not very exciting.

Multiplayer, like the campaign, doesn't bring much new to the table. Blacksite's online consists of four modes. There's the usual trinity of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, and there's Abduction mode. In Abduction, one player spawns as a Reborn and hunts down the humans on the map. After a human is killed, he or she becomes a Reborn and joins the other team. The last surviving human gets bonus points if he or she can survive until the clock counts down.

Our first online encounters weren't very laggy, but we went minutes without finding a game. There's also a funky split-second delay between your death and the screen that indicates that you've been killed. Although some of the weapons have a good balance, the sniper rifle is among the worst we've seen in an online console shooter. After hitting someone three times with sniper shots, we still couldn't kill the player, nor did it seem to do any damage. Quite honestly, if you're playing the game on 360, the only reason to bother stepping online is for very easy achievements in ranked matches, such as 10 points per mode for simply completing a ranked game, or points for getting online at all.

Well-done propaganda is usually subversive and flashy. Unfortunately, in spite of the creative direction of Harvey Smith of Deus Ex fame, Blacksite: Area 51 is neither. As a shooter, it's an awfully generic game that we're hard-pressed to recommend among the smorgasbord of significantly better FPS titles out there right now. As a political allegory, it's undermined by poor audio with no subtitles, heavy-handed storytelling, and little to emotionally invest in these characters. Visually, it's not ugly, but there's not much about it that's distinguishable, and the framerate bottoms out every once in a while. Multiplayer has some issues such as lag and weapon imbalances that don't render it unplayable, but don't help it at all, either. By no means is Blacksite a bad title. It is, however, quite mediocre.